Dying by the Sword

Hammers and Swords; The Tendency of Objects Not To Fall; Where Porthos Decides It Would be a Bad Idea To Drop Objects on His Own Head

PORTHOS didn’t know when his mind had become attached to the high unlikelihood of Mousqueton’s having dropped a hammer on his own head. He just knew that it had. Of course, it would have been far easier to ask the question of Mousqueton, but he judged from Monsieur de Treville’s expression that such an interview would be a hard thing to arrange.

And so, Porthos was left with the explanation that the guards of the Cardinal had given for having found Mousqueton unconscious next to the murdered armorer. And all he could do was to interest himself in the matter personally, as it were.

At any rate, Porthos had found, through the many crimes he and his friends had got involved in-and truly, what was it that had brought so many sudden deaths into their path all of a sudden?-that more than people’s conversations, more than confessions or lack thereof, more than the deceptions and counter deceptions of humans, what made sense to him were concrete facts: where blood had fallen when it erupted frm the body of the murdered person. And how far the man had to walk after being hurt, or else, whether there was another way into a room.

Words were all very well, Porthos thought. Certainly, Aramis seemed to derive an immense amount of pleasure from fiddling around with them, arranging them pleasantly and, sometimes, twisting them around to give them meanings that nature never intended. Words were to Aramis as wigs were to certain men, who liked to sport a different head of curly hair for every day of the week-utterly unnecessary but a source of great pride and joy.

Porthos didn’t begrudge Aramis this joy. At least he didn’t begrudge it when Aramis was using the words for purposes other than bludgeoning Porthos with them. When he was using them for that purpose, Porthos tended to become rather ill-tempered, because most of those words made no more sense to him than if Aramis were to speak a foreign language. Which, in fact, he found, Aramis often did, speaking Latin or Greek, or who knew what else, and making the chore of understanding him yet more difficult.

And Athos… Athos hoarded words like a miser hoards gold. And when he spoke at all, it was as likely to be in his own words as in the words of some great writer dead a thousand years or more.

The one whose words made the most sense to Porthos was D’Artagnan. Not that the young man was always straightforward. But he tended to use his words to serve a purpose, and not just to make himself feel this way or that. And words, as far as Porthos was concerned, were just-tools-tools with which he was, he confessed, devilishly clumsy.

So he would leave words behind. He was sure, just like Aramis intended to question Hermengarde, that Athos would go and question someone or other at the palace. And D’Artagnan would, doubtlessly, find some Gascon to give him information about something. As many Gascons as there were in the capital, and as clannish as they tended to be, the surprising thing would be if he didn’t find someone to give him information.

But all of this involved words and understanding the words of others, and Porthos simply did not have the patience to deal with that. So, instead, he would deal with hammers and swords-things that could not lie and that very rarely spoke in words. Well, at least not unless one was dead drunk. And even then, Porthos was fairly sure that the swords and the hammers didn’t talk so much as the wine roared in his head.

He walked away from Athos and D’Artagnan as they were trying to convince Aramis not to leave. Why they were trying to do that was quite beyond Porthos’s ken, since, after all, Aramis had always done exactly what he wanted to do and would doubtless continue to do so. He walked along gradually narrowing streets, till he found himself on the street where the armory stood. It was still closed. Or perhaps, he thought, it was closed again.

After all, he thought, the armory wouldn’t be open now, because-and he cast a surprised look up at the sky-night had fallen. A look around sufficed to tell him the streets were quite deserted. Unlike parts of town where there were taverns, or hostelries, there was nothing here to call the custom passersby. Only homes, and closed stores.

From the homes, usually right next to the stores, came voices and the occasional cry of infants. None of the homes were very large or very sturdy-just barely more than hovels, made of stone. The house next to the armorer’s was a little larger, and perhaps in this area it passed as a wealthy residence. Porthos supposed so, after looking at it appraisingly. He also judged, from the light of fire and probably candles emanating through the cracks in the wooden shutters of the room most distant from the armorer’s, that everyone would be gathered there, probably having dinner. This meant, if he was going to break into the armory, now would be the best time to do it.

He walked towards the door, as though he had every right to be there. Although he doubted that very many people would be looking out of doors at this time, he had long ago learned that when doing something reprehensible or-in this case-highly illegal, it was best to proceed as though one were doing something official and perfectly legitimate.

The door was heavy and, to Porthos’s eyes, looked like oak. In the almost complete dark, he found the lock on it, part by touch and part by sight. It was a sturdy lock. But then Porthos was an unusually sturdy man. In fact, he had often been compared to the giants in the Bible-and he was never sure the comparison was meant as flattery. He had often thought when he retired from the musketeers he would devote his life to replicating the feats of Hercules, at least those that didn’t involve dressing up as a girl, which he had the vaguest of ideas Aramis had once told him Hercules had done. Of course, Aramis might have been lying. The fact that Athenais once, for the purpose of hiding him, had dressed Aramis in a fashionable green dress [3] still seemed to rankle Porthos’s friend.

So he set his hands to the wood, one massive hand pushing against a panel of wood, while the other seized hold of as much of a lip as there was on the other side of the door and pulled. His first attempt at applying force caused the lip of the wood to crack and splinter. However, it also pulled the door slightly out of true, giving Porthos a firmer grasp on that side of the door. With that firmer grasp, well past the lip that covered the joining of the two halves, Porthos pushed and pulled again.

Meeting with resistence, he thought that the lock might have been forged by the late armorer who, as Porthos had told his comrades, was known for metals of exceptional resistence and strength.

But just as he thought it was a lost cause, he heard wood splinter, as the lock, under pressure and not breaking, parted company with the more fragile oak. The side of the door that had been under the lip of the other side let loose and swung inward into the shadows of the armory.

Porthos paused, long enough to recover his breath, and then entered the armory in turn.

It was warm. Even during a winter night, the armory retained some of the heat of the forges, a heat augmented by the banked fires-the embers of the last fires, now covered in ashes, to keep them smoldering but not burning-glowing in the massive hearths.

The armory looked like a very large smithy, with two large forges and a succession of smaller ones. Porthos did not doubt that if Monsieur Langelier had been born and lived in a village that was exactly what he would have been, his talent for weapons notwithstanding. He’d have run a smithy and shod horses and mended plows and shovels as often as he would get to mend the occasional sword or create the occasional knife. Or rather, far more often, for those were the services that people in villages needed more often.

Even if there were a seigneur, in a village, it was not to be thought he would engage in dueling all that often. Not even with the lords of neighboring villages. Well, at least not, he corrected himself, scrupulously, unless he chanced to be of the same disposition as D’Artagnan’s late father, who seemed to duel with even his best friends, just to keep in practice.

But, generally, in such small, confined societies, even the most bellicose of lords had to keep on good terms with his neighbors, and certainly couldn’t afford to duel any of them to the death.

In Paris, however, people of Monsieur Langelier’s abilities could obtain ample reward for them, and do nothing but work upon swords all day long. The evidences of this work, in the shape of swords in various stage of finishing piled in corners and hung upon walls and depended from racks on the ceiling. Even in the dark, Porthos could catch glimmers of their shapes and his practiced eye could have told which ones were finished-by and large the ones on ceiling racks and walls-and which ones were not-mostly the ones in piles, in various places throughout the workshop.

Without light, he could tell nothing else, but fortunately Porthos, in what Athos doubtlessly would call one of his strangely provident turns of mind, had thought to stop on the way here and provide himself with two candles from his lodging. Not that stopping had interrupted his thoughts or given him much pause. Or that he had even thought of what he might use the candles for. If he were forced to explain his decision to bring candles in so many words, he would say that he realized he would need light to see by, and that an armorer’s, after nightfall and closing, was unlikely to provide that.

Now he made sure that the door was closed again and met as nearly as it could, so no light escaped from within. Then, in darkness even deeper than before, he went to the big hearth. Using one of the pokers nearby, he moved aside some of the ash from atop the embers, and touched the wick of one of the candles to it, then smiled and sighed as the light came up, pure and white.

The candle was made of the best wax, the sort of wax often burned at cathedrals during Mass. Heaven only knew where Mousqueton had got it, though of course Porthos hoped he hadn’t stolen it from the cathedral.

He didn’t think so. Mousqueton was of a larcenous frame of mind, but not an impious one. Now, stealing it from one of the merchants who sold to the cathedral before they could make delivery, that was something else, and he wouldn’t answer for it that Mousqueton hadn’t done so.

At any rate, the light was much better than anything that anyone had any right to expect from a single candle, and Porthos dripped some wax onto one of the large anvils, and stuck the candle to it as it hardened. Then he looked around.

Given the benefit of the light, and his reasonably sharp eyesight, he could see this was where the murder had happened-right there, next to the anvil, where a dark stain marred the dirt floor.

Porthos looked up, almost instinctively, at the weapons hanging over the forge. Swords. Just swords. But… Porthos was sure that they’d said that Mousqueton had been felled by a hammer falling from the rack over the anvil.

Well, let’s imagine then, he thought, that there truly was a hammer hanging up there amid the swords.

He frowned. It seemed a very unlikely thing to imagine. The racks were affixed to the ceiling of the workshop, more than ten feet up. At least Porthos presumed so because he was a very tall man, and yet with his arm extended he could not reach the tip of those swords. He could tell that these were the armorer’s best swords-shining examples of the sword-maker’s art. Which explained, of course, why they were hung so far up and out of reach of anyone who might come into the workshop and perhaps momentarily manage to distract the armorer with talk.

The inferior swords were hung from the wall, where the enterprising might reach them, but not these. So why would anyone hang a hammer-a tool of the trade-that far out of reach?

It made no sense at all. First, all the hammers Porthos could see were either dropped here and there, haphazardly, or stacked neatly near one of the anvils. In either case, he thought, they were where they could be quickly reached.

And besides-he frowned up into the dark recesses of the ceiling from which the racks hung-wouldn’t a hammer falling from that distance onto someone’s head kill them? Instead of just stunning them? Well… perhaps not. Perhaps if it only hit a glancing blow. And it would depend on the size of the hammer. I guess I’ll have to try it to see.

Porthos was, in fact, very much a man who could not believe without seeing. Aramis, once, mid-argument, had flung at him that he was a doubting Thomas. Porthos could perceive from the tone of voice and the expression on Aramis’s face that the blond musketeer meant this as a terrible insult. It had missed its mark. As far as Porthos was concerned, Saint Thomas was the only man who had handled Christ’s resurrection the way it should have been handled.

After all, if your teacher and master, who claims to be the son of God himself, has just returned from the dead, wouldn’t you want to make sure it was him and not some fakery, by putting your fingers or hand into his wounds? Else, how would you know it wasn’t just something painted on, and the look on the man’s face a mere casual resemblance? And if you were going to go out preaching this as truth to the whole world, how could you not need to know for sure?

He shook his head in dismissal of Aramis’s odd notions, notwithstanding that Aramis was a good man and a better friend. Porthos must remember this, and perhaps he should try to argue with him less. Aramis could not avoid the blindness his excellent education had created in him.

Meanwhile Porthos, who was far from blind, discerned in the corner an instrument somewhat like a shepherd’s crook, which was used to bring swords down and put them up onto the ceiling racks. He loped over to get it, and returned to select a hammer to hang up.

Here he was faced with an immediate problem because while swords had means of hanging from the hooks on the suspended racks, hammers did not. There was no handle, no loop of leather, no way he could hook that hammer on the shepherd’s crook, and get it hanging from the rack. Which left… balancing the hammer on the shepherd’s crook and hanging it up there.

Porthos looked at the hammer, the handle of which was big enough to fit his own hand, but for which most men would need two hands, and the head of the hammer, which was almost as big as Porthos’s own head. “Right,” he said, and wandered off in search of some sort of material to make a loop. He found it in the form of a pile of leather strips in the corner, that, by the look of them, were used as some sort of polishing implement.

He tied a couple of the longer strips to the hammer handle, then using the crook, gently inserted the loop into one of the hooks on the rack, then looked up at the hammer hanging amid the swords. So far so good. If there had been a hammer hanging on the rack, that would be what it had looked like. Now, if that hammer fell, and hit someone on the head…

Porthos frowned upwards. The hammer was too high for the result of such a blow to be unconsciousness. Even a casual blow, glancingly struck, would kill a man when coming from that height and endowed with the speed and force of its fall. He could not try it on himself. Of course, he could not try it on anyone else either. Not that he expected to have any volunteers.

So, what was the good of putting a hammer up there, except to prove to whomever came in after him that hammers could indeed be hung up there? None that he could think of.

He frowned at the swords up there. But then, how could Mousqueton have got those swords, again, without getting hold of the shepherd’s crook? Oh, Mousqueton was ingenuous and able, both as a servant and a thief. Porthos had seen him steal bottles from locked cellars and meat from the spit without the owners being any the wiser. But… a sword? Wouldn’t the armorer think it odd, if Mousqueton went to get the crook, to pull out the sword?

Besides, this was an armorer to which Porthos sent Mousqueton often enough. There was no possible way the man did not know of Mousqueton’s sad failings when it came to the eighth commandment. Just like anyone who had a passing acquaintance with Aramis knew of his almost inimical relationship with the seventh. No one in his right mind would allow Mousqueton near his property or Aramis near his wife.

But Porthos knew all this was no good. His friends might believe him. His friends might understand that Mousqueton could not possibly have stolen the sword. But his friends either already understood, or were willing to pretend they believed that Mousqueton was innocent. To strangers, he couldn’t possibly explain how stupid the whole story was.

Well, first because Porthos couldn’t hope to explain much of anything else. His words would get tangled, even if he tried to explain things people already knew or with which they were in utter agreement. But, beyond that, in this case, people would simply tell him that Mousqueton would have asked for the sword, as if to evaluate it, and then killed the armorer with it.

Which was utter nonsense, of course. If Mousqueton asked the armorer for the sword, the armorer was likely to laugh in his face. If it was Langelier’s masterpiece, neither Mousqueton, nor Porthos, nor indeed Monsieur de Treville could have afforded it.

So it left Porthos to figure out-and prove-whether the hammer could be brought down from the rack or not.

He wondered what could make the hammer fall? Shaking the rack, definitely. Taking a deep breath, he took the flat end of the shepherd’s crook, and set about shaking the rack back and forth.

The swords swayed and trembled, and hit each other with an infernal racket, sounding much like a madman loose in a bell tower and having hold of the ropes to the bells. And yet, neither sword nor hammers fell. Porthos hit the side of the rack with the hook, with enough force to set the rack swaying on the chains that suspended it from a ceiling beam.

Through the deafening racket, he barely heard the voice from outside, “Holla! What goes on in there? Who is there?”